Gun owners not likely to use firearms for self-defense, study claims
The comments following the above article are pro-gun for the most part. There is a pretty good discussion about whether or not VPC is violating their tax exempt status with their admitted lobbying. Someone had to point out that the the NRA-ILA isn't a tax exempt entity even though the NRA is.A new study attempts to debunk the claim that gun owners rely on their firearms for self-defense.
The left-leaning Violence Policy Center released a study Wednesday that finds people are much more likely to use a gun to kill someone without cause than to protect themselves.
According to the study, gun owners committed 259 justifiable homicides compared to 8,342 criminal homicides in 2012, the most recent year data was available.
That means gun owners are 32 times more likely to kill someone without cause than to act in self-defense, the study reasoned.
The obvious fallacies in the VPC's arguments, to me, are:
1. Most DGU's don't result the gun even being fired, so the number of justifiable homicides doesn't come close to indicating how much good is done by legally carrying citizens.
2. The percentage of the entire population of the US that regularly legally carry a firearm is reasonably close to 2% which means that most of those 8,342 CRIMINAL homicides were committed against unarmed victims or other criminals.
3. Assuming one gun for each homicide (not likely for criminals) that's less than 9,000 lethal firearms out of 100 million.
I haven't thoroughly read the VPC .pdf but I can pretty much bet that they cherry picked their data out of a much larger set. We know for a fact that firearm deaths and very low compared to almost all other causes.
For example, although not applicable to this particular topic, shooting sports are close to, if not the, lowest cause of sporting deaths of primary and secondary school aged children in the US.
I thought I had to pay the seller, get a NICs check, and pay the state before I became an owner... so stealing counts?!? 